Impediments to Hypochondria

Winter is upon us here in Amsterdam, although to be honest I'm not sure I could draw a line between fall and winter, except to say that it's on average a little bit colder now than it was a month ago. We still have the same stretches of now-drizzling-now-pouring rain intermixed with drear, quiet cloud cover, and those stretches are still broken every now and then by dazzlingly welcome sunlight.

The one thing I'm not used to is the hail: in California we didn't have any weather at all to speak of, and in Boston precipitation was generally limited to snow, rain, sleet, and freezing rain (those listed in order of decreasing tolerability). So while I've quickly become inured to being buffeted by sheets of sudden rain while biking to classes, I'm never ready for the rain to turn mean. Hail gets you less wet, it's true, but it's far more painful to be pelted by pea-sized ice pellets than by water, especially if you are as speedy a biker as I am.

I'm not complaining about any of this, though: the Internets tell me that it's currently 28° in Boston, and on Monday forecasters are expecting a wintry mix, which sounds inordinantly more magical than it is, as I've mentioned before. Here, it's 43° and we might just barely catch an overnight freeze in the next week or so. This is one of the ways in which Amsterdam is superior to New England.

There are plenty of obvious differences between the Netherlands and the US, and plenty of small ones you would never notice unless you lived here. The contents of pharmacies fall into this second category.

One of the first things that happened upon my arrival here was me running out of ibuprofen, so one of my first shopping trips was to the first pharmacy I could find, a place called Kruidvat. The fact that the store's name means "powder keg" was unknown to me at the time; had it not been, I might have continued a bit farther down the street to find the slightly more upscale Etos. But in my happy ignorance I waltzed on in.

Chemical names are generally similar in Dutch and English, so it was easy to find the right product. It was in a little box, which pill bottles occasionally are, and it didn't rattle, which made me think: lots of cotton wool packed inside. When I got it home, however, I found no bottle. No, the Dutch pack their headache medicine in crinkly, environmentally unfriendly blister packs. There are many things wrong with that, but we need to keep moving here, because that's not nearly the worst thing about this product.
As pills go, these suckers are big. They may not look huge in this picture, but keep in mind that euro dimes are bigger than US dimes. Treating a headache here is not noticeably different from swallowing a Mento whole.

One possible reason the pills are so big: they're all 400mg. This saves me having to take two at a time, but makes me twice as worried about what would happen if a kid got hold of one of these packs. What do kids love? Popping bubbles and opening things. What do kids generally do? Put stuff in their mouths. What makes items all the more enticing for mouth-putting-into? How about if they're bright pink. My headache medicine was designed by Prescription Barbie.

I can only assume that the Dutch don't ever find themselves needing to nonverbally communicate things like "I am working SO HARD on this project it hurts, but will keep soldiering on no matter what" or "your presence is irksome to me, to the point where it physically hurts to be around you." Because both of those statements are severely undercut when the pill you're dramatically dry-swallowing is hot pink, candy-like, and likely to induce a choking fit.

Even familiar products here can still have strange packaging. Take this packet of gum, for example:
Let's start with the picture on the left. "Cover your teeth with this gum, for some reason," it seems to be announcing. Or, "Chew this gum, and your teeth will look like Mary Tyler Moore!"

But seriously, what is this symbol actually supposed to mean? You might assume, based on the fact that the second symbol seems to be prescriptive ("Spit your gum in the trash"), that the lefthand image must also contain some sort of instruction or advice. My best actual guesses are that it means either "This gum protects your teeth!" or "This gum coats your teeth with enamel-eating sugars!"

Although: if you don't assume the righthand picture to give gum disposal instructions, you kind of have to figure it's actually an important warning. Like, "CAUTION: When mixed with saliva, this gum produces an acid so powerful as to dissolve anything in its path—including your hand!"

In conclusion: if you're planning a heist, and need a getaway vehicle, some choices are clearly less desirable than others.